The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think

by Robert Pantano

With no more than a glance upward at a clear, starry night sky, as we stare into the eyes of the incomprehensible and infinite space above us, we are likely to experience an overwhelming awareness of how little we know and how little we are.

Nothing about this life is simple or clear, and from the perspective of the stars, nothing down here on earth—including us—matters

we suffer not as a result of not having enough things like money, status, success, or ideal external circumstances, but because the desire for such things is attached to the impossible delusion of a permanent self capable of being satisfied by desire.

You are everything you’ve never heard or perceived. You are everything you’ve ever hated. You are everything you’ve ever loved. You are what’s inside and what’s outside your mind and your body. And you are none of the above. If you exist, you cannot be free. If there is no you, you cannot be contained by anything.

“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.”

“Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.”

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?

we have all, at least at times, experienced the Kafkaesque.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy . . . Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books.

“Man,” Sartre said, “is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.”

Camus draws a connection between the tiresome and futile fate of Sisyphus and the human experience. However, Camus wrote, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

“I err, therefore I am.”

We become angry about everything because we refuse to let ourselves be sad about some things.

We are not really at the center of anything at all, not even our own minds. We are not important in any grand sense. No one really cares. This